Malaysia’s defense minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, offered the detail a day after the country’s prime minister, Najib Razak, ended days of hesitant, sometimes contradictory government statements about the Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared over a week ago. Mr. Najib acknowledged on Saturday that military radar and satellite data showed the plane had probably been deliberately diverted by at least one person onboard and flown far off its intended route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Now Malaysia is coordinating a 25-nation effort to find the plane, and to work out why it went so far off course. The sequence of the pilot’s actions and communication has been a focus of intense scrutiny, especially whether the signaling system, ACARS, was disabled before or after his last verbal message.

Consider the amount of fuel on board at departure.The Amount of fuel it would take to reach the last know position.Subtract the large amount of fuel it would take to climb to and maintain 40,000 ft.At the last know position calculate the distance it could fly with remaining fuel and then from that last know position draw a circle with a radios of the distance the plane could fly on the remaining fuel left after all the calculations.The plane will be somewhere within that circle or very damn close.